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Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run ThemSun, 02 Aug 2015 12:39:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Panasas Unveils New Storage Appliance with SSD Accelerationhttp://www.hpcwire.com/2012/09/17/panasas_unveils_new_storage_applicance_with_ssd_acceleration/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=panasas_unveils_new_storage_applicance_with_ssd_acceleration
http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/09/17/panasas_unveils_new_storage_applicance_with_ssd_acceleration/#commentsMon, 17 Sep 2012 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4351<img style="float: left;" src="http://media2.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/Panasas_on_background.bmp" alt="" width="120" height="79" />Panasas has launched ActiveStor 14, the company's fifth-generation storage applicance aimed at high performance computing. The new offering adds solid state drives (SSDs) to what has been almost exclusively a hard disk-based (HDD) NAS storage line-up. The inclusion of SSDs into the company's flagship offering is further proof that flash memory has become a mainstream storage technology for accelerating HPC workloads.

]]>Panasas has launched ActiveStor 14, the company’s fifth-generation storage applicance aimed at high performance computing. The new offering adds solid state drives (SSDs) to what has been almost exclusively a hard disk-based (HDD) NAS storage line-up. The inclusion of SSDs into the company’s flagship offering is further proof that flash memory has become a mainstream storage technology for accelerating HPC workloads.

It’s also a recognition that HPC storage is more that just about streaming lots of data from cheap SATA drives. This has been the case for some time, even if the customers themselves were unaware of it. When Panasas surveyed 10 typical HPC sites (across government, finance, academia and manufacturing), it was found that 50 to 70 percent of their files fell into the “small file” category — defined as less than 64KB.

This was true even for those users whose storage capacity was dominated by very large files, and who believed high-throughput I/O was the crux of their storage needs. “The reality is that almost all customers are dealing with mixed workloads.” says Geoffrey Noer, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Panasas.

The presence of so many small files suggests that directory information retrieval and random I/0 performance is a critical requirement across many HPC sites. At the same time, these users had a concrete need for high levels of streaming performance to feed at least a portion of their applications. The need for both bandwidth and IOPS from Panasas’ customer base was central to the inclusion of SSD hardware alongside high capacity SATA drives in ActiveStor 14.

Using flash technology isn’t exactly virgin territory for Panasas. In 2009, they came out with ActiveStor 9, an SSD-accelerated storage appliance that was aimed specifically at small file I/O. Since it depopulated disk slots in favor of SSDs though, ActiveStor 9 suffered on the throughput side.

With ActiveStor 14, the company delivers both IOPS and throughput by marrying big SATA disks with the latest SSD technology. The idea is to store all the file metadata on the SSDs as well as all the small file data. The idea is to put the vast majority of the “hot” data into flash, which should greatly increase I/O performance.

There are three ActiveStor 14 models available, each with its own mix of HDD and SSD capacity on the storage blade to serve different application profiles.

1. For large file throughput-oriented applications, each blade houses two 4TB SATA disks, one 120GB SSD and 8GB of cache. This is aimed at energy exploration, government, manufacturing, and academia. List price for 81.2TB of storage is $125K.

2. For more mixed workloads, they’ve come up with a blade identical to the one above, but with a 300 GB SSD. This configuration is targeted at analytics for biosciences, especially genomics. List price for 83TB is $145K.

3. For truly file heavy, random IOPS applications, they have a blade with two 2TB SATA disks, one 480GB SSD, and 16GB of cache. Panasas calls this one the ActiveStor 14T (for turbo) and it’s aimed at financial analytics, like Monte Carlo simulations for arbitrage modeling. Because of the greater ratio of SSD storage to HDD, this is the most expensive model, with a list price of $160K for 44.8TB.

But you get the performance you pay for. A shelf of ActiveStor 14T, with 27 data drives, delivered 20,745 operations per second (SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3) and an overall response time of 1.99 milliseconds. Using two shelves, operations per second doubled to 41,116 and overall response time was cut to 1.39 milliseconds.

It’s no surprise Panasas developed ActiveStor configurations designed specifically for financial services and biosciences, since those two verticals have seen the biggest uptick in sales at Panasas over the last year. According to company chief marketing officer Barbara Murphy, they have seen revenue grow by 5X in the financial sector and nearly 2.5X in biosciences since 2011.

Panasas revenue, in general, has been growing at a nice clip over the past 12 months, and actually has been on the rise for four straight years. But commercial sales are accounting for a much greater share now: from about 55 percent in 2011 to over 70 percent in 2012. With public spending on the wane a bit, and businesses investing more heavily in HPC, Panasas intends to put a lot of energy into serving these markets. “We believe that the commercial space is going to adopt high performance compute very aggressively over the next couple of years,” Murphy told HPCwire.

Over that same period, Panasas has grown their customer base from 300 to 400. They’ve has done so by relying more on their OEM partners, like Dell, HP, SGI, and Bull, to expand the revenue base. Today Panasas claims a nice selection of elite customers, including seven of the top 10 public oil & gas firms, NIH, the Beijing Genomics Institute, UCLA, Leicester University, and BNP Paribas.

In ActiveStor 14, they believe they have a platform that can compete very well in the analytics domain, especially against more expensive offerings from EMC Isilon and NetApp. At a price point of $4/GB price point for the 14T model and under $2/GB for the less SSD-rich models, they compare favorably with the $12/GB price of Isilon’s S200 and $9/GB for NetApp’s FAS6240. The latter delivers slightly better performance (using the SPECsfs2008_nfs.v3 benchmark), but is more than twice as expensive on a capacity basis.

Despite the ActiveStor 14 design being suitable for a range of analytics-type applications, Panasas will continue to focus on its technical computing/HPC roots, according to Noer. “Our goal here is not to go after the enterprise market,” he says. With the HPC on a very healthy growth trajectory, that should be enough to keep Panasas on its upward revenue path.

The company is demonstrating ActiveStor 14 gear this week at the HPC for Wall Street event in New York City and at the Trading Architecture Europe conference in London. Systems can be ordered today, with shipments slated for November 2012.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2012/09/17/panasas_unveils_new_storage_applicance_with_ssd_acceleration/feed/0DataDirect Pushes Storage Appliance to Next Levelhttp://www.hpcwire.com/2011/11/09/datadirect_pushes_storage_appliance_to_next_level/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=datadirect_pushes_storage_appliance_to_next_level
http://www.hpcwire.com/2011/11/09/datadirect_pushes_storage_appliance_to_next_level/#commentsWed, 09 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4632On Wednesday, DataDirect Networks unveiled its new Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) system, the SFA12K, its third generation SFA platform. Like previous SFA offerings, this one, of course, is aimed at super-sized HPC machines, but it is also targeted at big data applications that are spreading across the Internet and infiltrating enterprise datacenters.

]]>On Wednesday, DataDirect Networks unveiled its new Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) system, the SFA12K, its third generation SFA platform. Like previous SFA offerings, this one, of course, is aimed at super-sized HPC machines, but it is also targeted at big data applications that are spreading across the Internet and infiltrating enterprise datacenters.

The SFA12K follows the recently-announced SFA10K-X and the original Storage Fusion platform, the SFA1000, which DDN introduced in 2009. The two big focus areas for this architecture are vastly increased performance and support for embedded applications — what DDN likes to call in-storage processing. The design focuses on placing a lot of internal and external bandwidth in the hardware, along with enough processing power in the controllers for I/O applications to run natively inside the storage appliance.

“The SFA12K is really the first embodiment of that capability,” says Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder of DataDirect Networks.

The idea is to consolidate data-intensive software and hardware in one platform, which in the HPC realm allows customers to embed parallel file systems or other custom storage software directly inside the storage gear. For enterprise and internet companies, it will enable businesses to blend advanced analytics and multimedia content/distribution software into the platform, with the intent to process huge amounts of unstructured data in real time. In this realm, typical applications include internet search, financial risk analysis, inventory management, personalized advertising, digital security, and fraud detection.

Bouzari says performing storage processing right where the data is maximizes I/O flow, lowers latency and eliminates the need for running these applications on external servers. That means the I/O can operate at memory speeds, rather than network speeds. This will be especially critical as datasets get larger and applications get more demanding of real time response and use random access patterns, says Bouzari.

Performance-wise the SFA12K is certainly a speed demon. A single storage appliance can deliver 40 GB/sec of bandwidth, which is four times as fast as the original 2009-era SFA10000 and two and half times as fast as the newer SFA10K-X . With just 25 full racks strung together with InfiniBand or Fibre Channel, an SFA12K deployment could deliver an aggregate bandwidth of 1 TB/second.

Those numbers would only be attainable under the high end model, known as the SFA12K-40. That model is for block storage only, as is the SFA12K-20 version, which tops out at 20 GB/sec. DDN is also offering a 20 GB/sec appliance, called the SFA12K-20E. This last one is designed to host embedded storage software (thus the E designation), like DDN’s own ExaScaler and GridScaler parallel file systems, other HPC file systems, or any third-party storage application as described above.

From a storage media perspective, customers can configure the SFA12K with a mix of SSD, SATA, and SAS drives (as they could for the previous generation SFAs). The only difference in this newest offering is that it supports the latest eMLC flash memory for SSDs and moves up to 4TB drives on the SATA option. Thanks to the high-capacity disk, just two SFA12K racks (88U) maxed out with 4TB drives can house a whopping 6.72 PB.

Underneath the covers is DDN’s Storage Fusion Fabric, a redundant non-blocking internal network of 160 6Gpbs SAS lanes (40 x 6Gbps SAS x 4 lanes), designed to extract maximum performance from the storage media. That’s not only important for aggregating the I/O from all those hard disks, but also meets the greater IOPS potential of SSDs, which can operate at much higher speeds than spinning disks.

“All of this just makes the product an incredible powerhouse for HPC applications,” says Bouzari.

The CEO says they already have booked more than 100 petabytes of customer orders for the SFA12K, split evenly between HPC and non-HPC customers. Of the 50 petabytes headed for the high performance computing installations, 15 PB are going to Germany for the recently announced 3-petaflop “SuperMUC” iDataPlex cluster at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ). The other 35 petabytes will end up at Argonne to serve as primary storage for the 10-petaflop Blue Gene/Q “Mira “supercomputer. The Mira installation will use the SFA12K-20E platform, in which the in-storage application is IBM’s GPFS file system.

The remaining 50 petabytes is destined for other customers who are much more reticent to talk about their storage set-up. According to Bouzari, a couple of deployments are going to cloud providers, a handful are in classified environments, and a remainder are headed to media content providers.

SFA12K systems will ship in the second quarter of 2012, but the DataDirect is obviously already taking orders. Pricing was not provided.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2011/11/09/datadirect_pushes_storage_appliance_to_next_level/feed/0Xyratex Unveils Lustre Storage Appliance for HPChttp://www.hpcwire.com/2011/06/14/xyratex_unveils_lustre_storage_appliance_for_hpc/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xyratex_unveils_lustre_storage_appliance_for_hpc
http://www.hpcwire.com/2011/06/14/xyratex_unveils_lustre_storage_appliance_for_hpc/#commentsTue, 14 Jun 2011 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=4812Storage maker Xyratex has announced the ClusterStor 3000, a rack-scale Lustre storage solution purpose-built for high performance computing. The product is the culmination of an effort that began with the aquisition of Lustre startup ClusterStor in 2010. We asked Xyratex Director of Strategic Business Development Ken Claffey to fill us in on his company's newest storage solution.

]]>Xyratex is one of oldest and largest storage vendors in the world. The 25-year-old company booked $1.6 billion in revenue last year, yet few people have ever heard of it. That’s because it primarily sells its equipment through OEM relationships with companies like IBM, Dell, and NetApp.

Through these partnerships, Xyratex has been able to penetrate deeply into the enterprise storage space. In 2010, they shipped over 1.5 exabytes of external storage and claimed 19 percent of enterprise storage capacity. According to IDC, the company is the largest OEM disk storage system provider in the world.

And thanks to the Xyratex’s broad market reach, a significant chunk of this storage ends up in high performance computing environments — an estimated 375 petabytes in 2010. But in November of last year, Xyratex made a more strategic HPC play by acquiring ClusterStor, a startup led by Lustre inventor Peter Braam.

The acquisition brought Braam, as well as Lustre architect Peter Bojanic, to Xyratex to bootstrap the company’s Lustre development team. Prior to joining Xyratex, Bojanic had led the Lustre group at Oracle, the company that inherited the file system through its 2009 acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Sun itself had obtained the Lustre technology through its 2007 acquisition of Cluster File Systems, Braam’s and Bojanic’s original Lustre venture.

The reunion of Lustre expertise and technology at Xyratex bore its first commercial fruit this week. On Tuesday, the company announced ClusterStor 3000, a rack-scale Lustre storage solution purpose-built for high performance computing. Like Xyratex’s other storage offerings, ClusterStor 3000 will be available through OEMs — as yet unnamed.

According to Xyratex, single rack node versions of ClusterStor 3000 are currently under trial at the University of Florida and University of Cambridge, with additional beta sites pending in oil & gas, research, life sciences, and government. First commercial shipments are expected in the fourth quarter of the year.

HPCwire asked Xyratex’s director of Strategic Business Development Ken Claffey to describe the new offering, its value proposition, and how it’s positioning the product in the HPC storage landscape.

HPCwire: How did Xyratex come to the HPC business?

Ken Claffey: Xyratex is the largest OEM supplier of storage systems in the world, and while many may not recognize the name, most HPC data centers will have storage system based on Xyratex technology operating in their datacenters today. We pioneered the high density platforms that have become the cornerstone of HPC storage when we delivered our first high density storage platform some seven years ago.

In addition we acquired ClusterStor last year and have expanded the development team to nearly 150 developers since then. ClusterStor was focused on clustered file systems and their application in HPC.

HPCwire: There are other storage clusters on the market that incorporate Lustre. Why are you calling the ClusterStor 3000 the “first true Lustre storage appliance?”

Claffey: We have changed that positioning slightly upon getting feedback from the analyst community. However, the ClusterStor solution is different from other so called appliances through the level of integration it incorporates both at a hardware and software level, from the embedded firmware and diagnostic software within the platform all the way up to managing the entire storage cluster through a single management interface. All key technologies are integrated into a single ClusterStor system, providing the best in scale-out performance, reliability and ease of management.

HPCwire: What kind of storage density and the performance-per-watt does it deliver?

Claffey: The ClusterStor 3000 can support up to 672 3.5-inch drives in a single rack, delivering over 2 petabytes raw and 1.5 petabytes useable capacity per rack — the highest density in the industry. It provides over 20 gigabytes per second of file system performance per rack, with linear performance scaling as new racks and systems are added.

This is delivered through the ClusterStor3000 unique Scale Out Storage Architecture, that integrates object storage server, RAID and storage capacity within in a singular storage cluster building block called a scalable storage unit (SSU). Therefore, the ClusterStor 3000 can provide 1.5 petabytes of useable RAID6 protected capacity with more than 20 gigabytes per second performance all within a 20KW power envelope. The ClusterStor 3000 delivers the best capacity and performance per watt available.

HPCwire: What else is unique about the technology?

Claffey: The system has been designed from the ground up to be optimized for performance and density. But what it also does through the ClusterStor Manager is alleviate the pain points so often associated with HPC storage and Lustre-based HPC storage in particular; the challenges of installation, of tuning performance and stability; and taming the complexity of managing petabytes of data. It is in these areas where the ClusterStor 3000 really is groundbreaking.

HPCwire: What level of the HPC storage market are you targeting — large multi-petabyte installations for top-end supercomputers, large and mid-sized cluster installations, or both?

Claffey: The ClusterStor 3000 is targeted at petabyte and above installations, it can however scale from hundreds of terabytes to 30 petabytes and from 2.5 gigabytes per second up to a terabyte per second.

HPCwire: Who do you see as your competition for this product?

Claffey: Our competition will be other OEM suppliers such as DataDirect Networks.

HPCwire: What can you say about your OEM partnerships at this point?

Claffey: All we can say is that we are engaged in qualification with multiple OEMs and that we will be announcing partnerships later this year.

HPCwire: What’s on the drawing board for the ClusterStor product line?

Claffey: We have a robust roadmap planned for both the ClusterStor 3000 product line and ongoing enhancements to the Lustre roadmap working in conjunction with the broader community. We will announce these new features as they become available.